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A 16th-Century Palazzo Hotel in Florence, Italy
Last month, the interior designer James Cavagnari opened the 14-room James Suite Hotel in a 16th-century palazzo in the center of Florence, Italy. The project was particularly personal: He grew up on the property, which his parents turned into a hotel in the 1980s. It had fallen into some disrepair after his mother became sick in 2010; during the pandemic, Cavagnari decided to take on the redesign. He became his own client, creating what he calls “dreamlike and theatrical” interiors that reference multiple eras and styles. He used Florentine raffia to cover the walls, turned vintage trunks into closets and desks, hung sketches by the architect Gio Ponti on the walls and covered the floors with Persian rugs. Many of the lamps are from the original house, while the glass pendant lights were made in Murano. To update the common spaces, Cavagnari installed an open kitchen in the center of the house and transformed the courtyard into a lush winter garden, which is now home to the James restaurant. Traditional dishes like bistecca alla fiorentina and taglioni served with a tomato and basil sauce are on offer, while the next-door lounge has bar snacks and small plates (like ceviche and tacos) in an intimate room with velvet chairs and tasseled table lamps. From $700 a night, manfredihotels.com.
— Gisela Williams
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Earthy Dishes From Herman Miller and Heath Ceramics
Since its founding in Michigan in 1905, the furniture company Herman Miller has collaborated with notable designers to produce influential pieces such as Bill Stumpf’s Ergon chair. Now, the brand is venturing into ceramic tableware in partnership with Heath Ceramics, which has produced its handcrafted dishes in Northern California since 1948 and has been making the pieces used at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., since 2006. The new Gathered collection comprises seven pieces including broad bowls and mugs with low-slung handles, available in earthy tones and brighter hues with names like lemon rind, yuzu and sunflower gloss. The palette is intended to channel the spirit of Alexander Girard, the founding director of the Herman Miller textile division, who took particular delight in pairing seemingly discordant colors. Available on Sept. 3, from $33 for a candleholder, hermanmiller.com and heathceramics.com.
— Emma Orlow
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A New York Exhibition Revisits an Icon of 1970s Land Art
When the artist Nancy Holt first traveled to the American West in 1968 with Robert Smithson, her husband, and Michael Heizer — fellow innovators in the land art movement — she felt an immediate connection to the desert. “Out there a ‘lifetime’ seems very minute,” Holt wrote of that vast, ancient terrain. “The panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points.” In 1973, she began a three-year project to construct her own human-scale viewfinders. She purchased a featureless 40-acre tract in Utah’s Great Basin Desert and consulted an astrophysicist to determine the precise angles of the solstices on her land. The resulting “Sun Tunnels” — four concrete cylinders, each 18 feet long and nine feet in diameter, all arranged in an X formation — perfectly frame the sun at the horizon on those two days of the year. Holes cut into the concrete let in the sunlight as it shifts across the desert, representing different constellations. “Echoes & Evolutions,” a new exhibition at Sprüth Magers’s New York gallery, will examine this site-responsive work with a deep cut of Holt’s related output, including detailed drawings, a 16-millimeter film from 1978 and composite photographic works that have a time-lapse effect. Visitors will also be invited to look through two steel-pipe sculptures from her 1971 “Locator” series. Holt, who died in 2014, considered herself a “perception artist,” says Lisa Le Feuvre, the executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation. “If one were to list all of the media of ‘Sun Tunnels,’ it would be concrete, but it would also be the site, the sky, the earth, the journey.” “Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels,” will be on view at Sprüth Magers, New York, from Sept. 5 through Oct. 25; spruethmagers.com.
— Laura Regensdorf
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A New Exhibition Contrasts Marie Antoinette’s Public and Private Life
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s forthcoming exhibition “Marie Antoinette: Style” marks the first time the French queen’s fashion and design legacy has been the subject of a dedicated show in London. Antoinette was a noted Anglophile, and the British were equally enthralled by her aesthetic. The V&A, which inherited a trove of her belongings in 1882, will explore Antoinette’s 250-year influence on style and decorative arts, as well as photography, performance and film. It will also contrast her public image — crafted through silk gowns, towering wigs and opulent jewels — with her private tastes, reflected in nature-inspired décor from Petit Trianon, the bucolic neoclassical retreat where she played farmhand and staged operas. Though Antoinette became a symbol of excess, she helped revolutionize 18th-century fashion by embracing softer silhouettes and natural motifs that challenged rigid court codes. Highlights of the exhibition will include glimpses into her private chambers in Versailles and pieces from the infamous Diamond Necklace Affair — a scandal in which Antoinette was wrongly implicated in a jewel heist that tarnished her reputation — along with costumes from recent screen portrayals. “Marie Antoinette: Style” will be on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from Sept. 20, 2025, through March 22 2026, vam.ac.uk.
— Esmé Hogeveen
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Furniture by Two Brazilian Sculptors, Paired for a Los Angeles Show
On Sept. 5, Christie’s Los Angeles will open “Lightness & Tension,” an exhibition that juxtaposes modernist furniture by the midcentury Brazilian master Joaquim Tenreiro with the first design collection by the São Paulo, Brazil-based artist Lucas Simões. Trained as an architect, Simões made his first pieces of furniture — shelving, an adjustable desk — as practical accessories for the heavy industrial tools and materials (concrete, steel, reams of paper) that shape his artistic practice. Later, while making a series of steel sculptures, he linked a pair of broad metal curves to create a lounge chair that looks like a balloon letter. During a studio visit in February, the São Paulo-based gallerist Ulysses de Santi invited Simões to develop a full furniture collection. The 19 resultant pieces — a marble-topped dining table modeled off that first work surface, a coffee table like an emphatic speech bubble — are playful but robust, “more like sculptures for the home than furniture,” Simões says. At first glance, they could hardly seem farther from Tenreiro’s delicate, dynamic work. But Tenreiro was a sculptor, too, who, like Simões in this collection, used his related practices as spaces of experimentation. In placing them together, de Santi says, “I wanted to collapse the distance between periods and disciplines, and show how both designers use structure to speak about fragility, weight and control.” “Lightness & Tension” will be on view at Christie’s Los Angeles from Sept. 5 through Sept. 19, ulyssesdesanti.com.
— Michael Snyder
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The post Why Marie Antoinette’s Influence Endures appeared first on New York Times.
